<?php
/**
 * <https://y.st./>
 * Copyright © 2018 Alex Yst <mailto:copyright@y.st>
 * 
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 * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
 * GNU General Public License for more details.
 * 
 * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
 * along with this program. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org./licenses/>.
**/

$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'A man with an umbrella',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2018/07/01.jpg" alt="Trees each with two colours of leaves on them" class="framed-centred-image" width="649" height="480"/>
<section id="drudgery">
	<h2>Drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		My discussion post for the day:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			It must be nice to have better context for that first question.
			I don&apos;t have television at home, so watching the series in question isn&apos;t really an option.
			It&apos;s probably available online, but online television services tend to lace their episodes with $a[DRM], making them incompatible with my $a[DRM]-free computer.
			YouTube is the only exception to this I know of, but being owned by Google, they demand a telephone number which they verify before allowing you to open an account.
			I don&apos;t have telephone service either, so even if I didn&apos;t realise how creepy it is that Google demands your telephone number, I couldn&apos;t give them what I don&apos;t even have.
			Obviously I&apos;m not going to buy a new computer and a telephone line just to watch one series for one discussion assignment, ha ha.
		</p>
		<p>
			I don&apos;t think I believe in your tally sheet.
			The main problem is that there&apos;s no absolute right and absolute wrong.
			We each have our own version of morality.
			For that reason, rights and wrongs can only be tallied on according-to-so-and-so basis, not a cosmic basis.
			Our actions do very much impact the lives of others though.
			Every little action you perform has consequences; life is a chain of causes and effects.
			With each moment caused directly by the moment before, these effects can of course compound and result in something bigger than the person initially sparking the chain reaction.
			That said, their action was in tern caused by the things before it, so with the right algorithm, we could flawlessly predict the future from the present or the past.
		</p>
		<p>
			We know that Bruno couldn&apos;t kill his grandfather, at least before his grandfather spawned his father, because it&apos;d violate causality.
			However, in what way do you think the murder would be prevented?
			Do you believe in the cosmic anti-paradox force mentioned in the video, that might intervene and stop Bruno from firing?
			Or perhaps Bruno would shoot and injure his grandfather, but his grandfather would be basically immortal because of who was trying to kill him?
			He couldn&apos;t die until after he&apos;d done his part to create his killer in this case.
			I don&apos;t like the theory presented by the video that Bruno might get distracted.
			There&apos;s always a probability that one would <strong>*not*</strong> get distracted, so not getting distracted has to be an option.
			If Bruno can&apos;t kill his grandfather, there <strong>*necessarily must*</strong> be some insurmountable barrier to success.
			Under the assumption that trim travel isn&apos;t possible, that obstacle would be inability to get to the past in the first place.
			Assuming time travel <strong>*is*</strong> possible and that paradoxes are not allowed to exist, some other obstacle must be present any time a time traveller would prevent the conditions necessary for their time journey to be undertaken.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<p>
		I finished a creative writing exercise in which I was to write a diary entry from the perspective of a character from a story we were assigned to read.
		I guess it made me think about the life of the narrator, though the story is bizarre to say the least.
		One character, if you could even call them that due to their apparent lack of personality and lack of motive for their actions, seems to violate the laws of physics by never eating or sleeping, but always performing the same unending task.
		Their energy should run out at some point, if nothing else.
		They&apos;ve been injured too, but they heal.
		Without food with which to rebuild their body with.
		And their shoes ... they don&apos;t stop ever, meaning they don&apos;t replace their shoes.
		Yet the shoes are not mentioned in the story to be worn through.
		Even if they were, you&apos;d still have the matter of their <strong>*feet*</strong> wearing down.
		We&apos;re right back to the healing without food issue again.
		Sure, I&apos;m overanalysing, but that&apos;s what happens when you ask me to analyse something.
		I actually analyse it, I don&apos;t stop just because I find something that doesn&apos;t add up.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="Minetest">
	<h2>Minetest plans</h2>
	<p>
		I got to thinking, and I just don&apos;t think using my elemental shrines as public spawn points is a good idea.
		For starters, it&apos;s just too vain.
		While my project is certainly massive and will span much of the map, it&apos;s still a personal project.
		I shouldn&apos;t be artificially making people care about it; I mean, people care about the main spawn point of a world, don&apos;t they?
		It acts as a common reference point and meeting place.
		With that in mind, I decided to figure out some smaller, confined project to be the spawn point.
		I mean, the spawn point should still look good, right?
		It&apos;s the first impression new players will get of the server.
		Once the spawn area is built, I&apos;ll go work on my own shrines and tunnel project in isolation.
		There&apos;s a good chance people won&apos;t find my project for a while, but when they eventually do, the project will probably be far along and they&apos;ll have much to look at.
		The project&apos;ll be far from being the main transit line of the server though.
		It&apos;ll be a hidden wonder to discover.
		The best part of decoupling the two is that I no longer need to wait to start my project.
		I&apos;ve been avoiding starting my new world because I didn&apos;t want to start the timer on switching spawn points until the world was actually available to the public.
	</p>
	<p>
		With the spawn point decoupled from the tunnel project and the shrines to the various elements, I accidentally came up with a new, better method of deriving coordinates for the shrines from the element names.
		Before, my plan was to derive the x and z coordinates from the drop name string.
		Now, instead, I&apos;ll derive the x coordinate from the node name string and the z coordinate from the drop string.
		There&apos;s a side effect though.
		Some items can be dropped by multiple nodes, and some of those multi-node elements also drop differing numbers of the items they drop sometimes.
		This means that while there was previously twenty-three planned hubs, there are now ninety planned hubs.
		Cotton and wheat plants have thirty-two planned hubs each.
		It&apos;s not going to be feasible to offer tunnel connection service to people seeking to link their builds to the network.
		There&apos;s just too much already for me to do.
		Having no one know about my tunnels and shrines at first will be to my benefit.
	</p>
	<p>
		I&apos;d planned to set up the shrines in the order that the elements appeared in Minetest Game.
		In the case of elements added by <code>renew</code>, I&apos;d instead order them as though they appeared at whatever point all required items (the drop and, if not added by <code>renew</code> itself, the node).
		This isn&apos;t really feasible now though.
		It&apos;d require me to build thirty-two wheat-based shrines and thirty-two cotton-based shrines sequentially.
		I&apos;d need to come up with hopefully-very-different ideas using basically the same materials, all at once.
		I think I&apos;ll get better results if I instead start with one wheat and one cotton shrine, then make one non-farming shrine, then do another wheat shrine and cotton shrine, and one more non-farming shrine, et cetera.
		At some point, if Minetest Game and <code>renew</code> haven&apos;t added any new elements, I&apos;ll need to start making two shrines for each of wheat and cotton to avoid ending up with a huge pile of only wheat and cotton shrines to build in the end.
	</p>
	<p>
		So anyway, I guess the current plan is to plan a spawn point and either a wheat or cotton shrine of some sort.
		It&apos;s too bad too, as I&apos;d made great progress in the apple shrine planning.
		It&apos;ll just have to wait though.
		I&apos;m probably going to need to bring in unrelated materials to make the wheat shrines different enough from one another.
		Wheat just can&apos;t be made into anything but straw.
		Sixteen straw creations and sixteen wheat fields just wouldn&apos;t be very interesting.
		Then again, they would accurately represent the wheat and wheat seed elements as they are: boring.
		I&apos;m actually having some issues with some of the more-boring minerals as well.
		Gold, tin, copper, and diamonds just aren&apos;t very flexible.
		And flint can&apos;t be used to create nodes at all, at least not directly.
		I&apos;m probably going to end up using a lot of coal for that shrine and calling it a fire temple or something.
	</p>
</section>
END
);
